Re: HOWTO: Install Cups-PDF

HOWTOs are mostly for people not that familiar with the Terminal and commandline stuff. So I think it's nice to see where in Nautilus you can do this sort of changes.

Maybe both (the chmod and nautilus versions) would be nice.

Well I'm sorry but there have been discussions about this before and it's pretty obvious copy and pasting one line into the command line is much easier and beats going through 10+ steps to get the same outcome. There's literally nothing that could go wrong. Ingoring the fact that explaining how to navigate through a gui can only be so precise, the less steps the better because there's less for them to screw up. What's the chance of them leaning on their keyboard by accident and deleting something important in nautilus compared to them screwing up a single copy and paste?

Also if you're using linux and aren't familiar with the command line well then now's the time to get familiar, not to mention people usually get familiar with the command line from following guides like those avaiilable on this forum. Now If you don't want or care for getting familiar with the command line then you better switch OS and stop wasting our time trying to help people who won't (read unwilling) even help themselves.

Sorry if I kind of sound a little annoyed. I think it's ok to try to avoid the command line, I just don't condone encouraging people to avoid it.

Last edited by Horizon; June 20th, 2006 at 04:14 PM.

Attached to the footprints in spring, to the Japanese song she taught me,
vaguely, I was influenced by her happiness.

Re: HOWTO: Install Cups-PDF

Originally Posted by Horizon

Well I'm sorry but there have been discussions about this before and it's pretty obvious copy and pasting one line into the command line is much easier and beats going through 10+ steps to get the same outcome. There's literally nothing that could go wrong. Ingoring the fact that explaining how to navigate through a gui can only be so precise, the less steps the better because there's less for them to screw up. What's the chance of them leaning on their keyboard by accident and deleting something important in nautilus compared to them screwing up a single copy and paste?

Also if you're using linux and aren't familiar with the command line well then now's the time to get familiar, not to mention people usually get familiar with the command line from following guides like those avaiilable on this forum. Now If you don't want or care for getting familiar with the command line then you better switch OS and stop wasting our time trying to help people who won't (read unwilling) even help themselves.

Sorry if I kind of sound a little annoyed. I think it's ok to try to avoid the command line, I just don't condone encouraging people to avoid it.

I absolutely second what you say. I believe that it's pretty dangerous to tell a new user who is not used to linux in general and permissions in particular to open a nautilus window with root privileges. Just imagine what happens if he leaves it open for a while, then maybe forgets about this and starts to meddle with his system while trying to follow the latest tutorial. If the person is able to open a terminal and type sudo nautilus, then he is also able to copy/paste the chmod-line.
I am not saying that the average linux beginner will start to randomly delete directories in the / dir , but as always, safety first. Ever thought about a harmless exploit in nautilus that becomes severe once nautilus is run as root? Or maybe I'm just being paranoid Just my 2 ct.